It feels like just a couple months ago that we were welcoming the new herald of extreme gaming performance with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X. Oh, wait… it was! And if you looked at the fully enabled GM200 in the Titan X and wondered how long it would take Nvidia to create a slightly trimmed down version at a more wallet friendly price point, wait no longer: The GeForce GTX 980 Ti is here.
The Titan X is the graphics card equivalent of a Ferrari. Every gamer dreams of owning one, but the reality is that only the privileged few can afford such extravagance. And even if you can afford a Titan X—or two—the actual need for such a potent GPU is questionable. For those who happen to run three QHD displays, yes, the 12GB VRAM might actually be necessary, but if you’re only using a single monitor—especially anything less than a 4K display—we’d suggest stepping down a notch.
Prior to today’s launch, stepping down meant the GTX 980 or an even more budget friendly GTX 970 or AMD R9 290X. There’s no question those graphics cards are slower, but at half or even one third the cost, the value proposition is way better. The GTX 980 Ti mixes things up a bit, however, and in the process it becomes the current high-end card of choice. Let’s quickly hit the spec sheet before we continue:
| Specs | 780 Ti | 980 | 980 Ti | Titan X |
| GDDR5 RAM | 3GB | 4GB | 6GB | 12GB |
| CUDA Cores | 2880 | 2048 | 2816 | 3072 |
| Base clock | 875 MHz | 1126 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1000 MHz |
| Boost clock | 928 MHz | 1216 MHz | 1075 MHz | 1075 MHz |
| Memory clock | 7GHz | 7GHz | 7GHz | 7GHz |
| Texture units | 240 | 128 | 176 | 192 |
| ROP units | 48 | 64 | 96 | 96 |
| TDP | 250W | 165W | 250W | 250W |
| Launch price | $700 | $550 | $650 | $1000 |
The Titan X sports a whopping 3072 CUDA cores clocked at 1000MHz (plus boost), paired with 12GB of GDDR5 running at 7010MHz. The 980 Ti trims down the core count to only 2816 CUDA cores (a drop of 8%) and cuts the amount of memory to 6GB GDDR5, all while maintaining the same clock speeds. What that means is that in many cases, the 980 Ti will be less than 8 percent slower than the Titan X, and at a substantial discount.
Which is not to say the GTX 980 Ti is cheap—far from it. Nvidia is pricing the 980 Ti as a premium product, with an MSRP of $650. It may not be a Ferrari, but it's still something expensive (a fancy BMW or Mercedes, perhaps?). Considering the GTX 980 is already the second fastest GPU in most games, there’s no real need for Nvidia to go any lower. There is a bit of good news, however, as the MSRP for the GTX 980 has been reduced to $500 with the release of the 980 Ti. The rest of the Nvidia GPU lineup remains unchanged, though AMD’s upcoming graphics cards could always lead to more price changes.
With a 30 percent price premium over the vanilla 980, ideally we’d like to see linear scaling of performance, and as we’ll see in a moment the 980 Ti scaling is 20-30 percent. Titan X scaling is 30-40 percent with a 90 percent increase in cost, so already the 980 Ti looks promising. Provided the rest of your hardware is up to snuff the 980 Ti is certainly worth considering.
The 980 Ti is particularly of interest for those running an older generation GPU like the GTX 680 or even the GTX 780/780 Ti. The added VRAM and architectural improvements make for a sizeable increase in performance, especially at higher resolutions like 4K. Nvidia says the 980 Ti is on average 60 percent faster than the 780 Ti and over twice as fast as the GTX 680. If you’re already running a 970 or 980, it’s a lot of money to spend for a relatively minor payoff, but those who like to skip a generation or two of hardware between upgrades are ripe for an update.
Besides performance, there are other reasons to look at upgrading, though it will be a bit longer before these become truly important. All the 900 series graphics cards use Nvidia’s latest architecture, with full support for all the upcoming DirectX 12 features; older hardware will only partially support DX12. Windows 10 hasn’t officially launched yet, and even after launch we still need to wait for the first batch of DX12 games to arrive, but if you’re using anything below a GTX 960 you’ll likely want to upgrade in late 2015 or early 2016.
Now let's jump into some data.
GTX 980 Ti Single-GPU Benchmarks
We tested on a new system with an Intel Core i7-5930K processor overclocked to 4.2GHz, 16 GB G.Skill DDR4-2266 RAM, Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4 motherboard, and two 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSDs for running today's hefty games like Grand Theft Auto 5.
In these charts you can see how the 980 Ti stacks up against several other single-GPU cards in average and minimum framerates at 1920x1080, 2560x1440p and 3840x2160. Unfortunately we don't have numbers for the Titan X on this test bench yet, as we've moved over to a new system for GPU reviews. We'll have exact numbers in a few days, but looking back at our Titan X review, you can see some comparable figures on a rig with an i7-4770K and 8GB DDR3 RAM.
In the Unigine Heaven benchmark at 4K, the Titan X hit an average fps of 27, while the 980 Ti got 25.4. In Shadow of Mordor at 4K, the Titan X hit an average 48 fps; the 980 Ti managed 45.9. As you can deduce from those two comparison, there's not a huge difference between the performance of the Titan X and 980 Ti, and it's about in line with the expected 8 percent difference. For today's games, the Titan X's 12GB of VRAM is far more than you'll need, even at 4K, and the 980 Ti is able to deliver playable framerates at 4K, though neither card is going to give you a solid 2160p60fps at Ultra settings.
Back to the data above: the 980 Ti is, predictably, a huge jump over the older 770, especially at 4K, and it does typically deliver 20-30 percent better performance than the 980, 50-70 percent better performance than the 970 and an average of about 50% better performance than the R9 290X. But the 980 Ti is also far more expensive than those cards. Things get a bit more interesting when we compare the 980 Ti against some multi-GPU setups in SLI and CrossFire.
980 Ti Multi-GPU benchmarks
There’s no arguing the fact that the GTX 980 Ti is a much better value than the Titan X. Similarly, there’s little debate about whether the 980 Ti is faster than AMD’s current fastest GPU, the R9 290X. If you want the fastest current graphics card short of the Titan X, the 980 Ti is the card to get.
The difficulty comes when we get to the value proposition. The 980 Ti isn’t a bad value compared to the vanilla 980, as it’s 20-30 percent faster in our testing and costs 30 percent more—nearly linear scaling of performance with price. But the GTX 980 isn’t exactly a great value as it’s roughly 30 percent faster than the 970 but costs 67 percent (now 50 percent) more. For roughly the same price as the 980 Ti, you can pick up two GTX 970 or R9 290X cards and run them in SLI or CrossFire.
If you’re thinking SLI/CF will win by a landslide, it depends on what game and settings you’re running. On average, 970 SLI is only 5-10 percent faster than the 980 Ti, but depending on the game it may be as much as 20 percent faster...or 15 percent slower. For such a small overall gain in performance, we’d take the 980 Ti. The added VRAM will likely prove more beneficial with time, with several newer releases already using more than 4GB VRAM at maximum quality and high resolutions, and it leaves the door open to 980 Ti SLI in the future. And single card solutions are almost always better—some games simply don't offer good SLI/CrossFire support, especially with launch drivers.
The 290X CrossFire matchup is harder to call; at 1080p, 290X CF is only 6 percent faster than the 980 Ti on average, but at 1440p it’s 22 percent faster and at 4K it’s 30 percent faster. That’s mostly thanks to great scaling in about half of our tests (Hitman Absolution, Shadow of Mordor, and Tomb Raider); in the other tests it’s around 5-10 percent faster. But then there’s the question of drivers, power requirements, and the overall user experience.
The Witcher 3 currently requires custom settings (no temporal AA) to get any scaling from CrossFire. We also ran into problems with Metro: Last Light consistently crashing our system—a feat not achieved by any other game, or with any other GPU. Yes, we’re running beta drivers, but hard locks (and in one case a system restore) are never a welcome experience.
Overclocking and conclusion
If you’re a day-one game purchaser, Nvidia has been better of late at getting drivers ready ahead of the major game launches, where AMD often comes a week or two later. Nvidia's GeForce Experience continues to be a more robust and friendlier software package for driver updates and game recording than AMD's Raptr Gaming Evolved. And more importantly, all of Nvidia's 900 series cards have also been quieter and more power efficient than AMD's. The 980 Ti and Titan X have TDPs of 250 watts, and offer a good bit of overclocking headroom without guzzling power and turning your gaming room into a wind tunnel.
We didn't have time to do serious overclocking or tinkering with the 980 Ti and see how far it could go, but we did manage to effortlessly establish a stable overclock in EVGA's Precision X: 164 MHz higher on the clock speed and about 240 MHz faster on the memory. Those tweaks made a noticeable difference in The Witcher 3 at 4K, taking our average framerates from under 30 fps to the mid-30s. With some tinkering, the 980 Ti should be able to put out a reliable 15 percent more performance when overclocked.
Given the $650 price tag and price/performance ratio, it's hard to recommend the 980 Ti to anyone who already bought a 970 or a 980; Nvidia, naturally, brands it as an upgrade for 680/780 owners. Out of the bunch, the 970 remains the price/performance king, but if you're always after 60 fps ultra in the latest games (especially at 1440p or 4K) the 980 Ti is the card to get.
At least, for the next couple of weeks.
AMD is working on the first major GPU update since the R9 290X launched in late 2013. Its next generation part should arrive later this month, and the top models will include HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), a new style of memory that should be far faster and more efficient than GDDR5. The launch date has been set for Q2’15 (which ends this June), and AMD has been teasing consumers with images lately, so the next few weeks should give us all the information we need on how AMD’s Fiji stacks up against Nvidia’s latest and greatest.
If you have to buy a graphics card today, the GTX 980 Ti offers great performance. It’s nearly the same performance as the Titan X at two-thirds the cost. But we can’t in good faith recommend buying the GPU right now. Wait to see what AMD has to say with Fiji and then decide where your loyalties lie. See if prices shift. Worst case, you’ve waited a few extra weeks. Best case, you might save money and/or get a faster GPU.
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